When Halloween 3: Season of the Witch underperformed both at the box office and with critical reception the idea of an anthology series based around the holiday disappeared. Fans and producers alike clamored for the return of Michael Myers and with this film they got him. He would never again be missing from the franchise for good or for ill.

We begin ten years after the events of Halloween: 2. Good old Mike has been in a coma all that time, resting quietly at a federal sanitarium. For reasons that go unexplained the powers that be have decided to transfer him back to Smith’s Grove the sanitarium, he escaped from all those years ago. The two idiot paramedics that are transporting him not only don’t bother strapping the villain down but discuss how he’s still got one living relative in Haddonville. Naturally, this pulls Michael Myers out of his coma and on another killing rampage on Halloween.

The surviving relative is Jamie, Laurie Strode’s young daughter who is now living with an adopted family (in this film Laurie died in a car crash sometime previous). 

Michael is back, having survived the fire from Halloween 2. Ditto Dr. Loomis. 

In a lot of ways, this film acts as a return to course. Fans hated Part III, the film seems to say, so we’ll do everything that made the first two films so popular and nothing else. Then we’ll turn it up a notch or two. There is a Strode family but this time the girl is even younger. It has Dr. Loomis but he’s acting even crazier than before. And of course, it has Michael Myers who is ready to kill even more people.

It more or less works. It doesn’t have nearly the originality or style as the first one, but it gets the job done.